webolife wrote:The joints between columns make great places for water to fill, but combined with the still oven hot temps, produce steam blasts that push away and/or destroy the columns being exposed.

You think the cause there is some residual heat? I conclude that because you say "the still oven hot temps". So what's causing these "blasts" of steam? Is it in a giant pressure cooker? What do you propose as the cause for these "hot temps"?

webolife wrote:2. In addition this area is called the potholes, for the numerous spots among the coulees where deep pits have been similarly blasted away by the inflowing water being turned to explosive steam.

What's your proposed mechanism for this? Am I wrong to infer you think there are some periodic deluges onto some glowing hot rock or something that causes these "blasts" of steam? Are you saying you think these "potholes" were dug by a flood from the multiple tsunami scenario you mentioned before?

webolife wrote:I'm confident the picture of him examining the Malachite Man fossils in situ is authentic

Of course it was authentic. The stained bones (not fossils, and perhaps some sculptures) were in loose sand, not incorporated into hard sandstone. They were buried, not embedded in rock. They were uncovered by a bulldozer? Wow, they got really lucky, another inch down and that bulldozer would have dug them all up into a pile of sand.

As for your claims about the loch ness monster and noah's ark, all I can say is...

Stalking's ire is up because I'm challenging all his claims... good! Petrified wood at the Gingko museum has been identified by species. I have collected the toothpicky specimens from the very center of the large petrified logs in eastern Washington. Claims to the contrary are baseless and wishful. I like fugurites as much as the next guy, but there is absolutely no reason to discount the nature of petrified wood. Some of those images are from the Arizona site, which is several hundreds of acres containing many well-defined logs, many of which are better examples than those Stalking picked. The typical Washington samples are much more detailed than many of the Arizona logs. That many centers of logs are relative voids or contain poorly petrified woody cells [like my toothpicky samples] is one indication that the petrifying process works from the outside in, unlike the alleged fulgurite strike. Unlike fulgurites which are typified by branching forms, the petrified logs are well formed stumps with fairly consistent ring patterns throughout. I don't deny an electrical connection to the petrifying process, but why deny the patterns you can see with your own eyes??

Truth extends beyond the border of self-limiting science. Free discourse among opposing viewpoints draws the open-minded away from the darkness of inevitable bias and nearer to the light of universal reality.

Ok I started this battle, and I'll stay engaged as long as there is more light than heat to be offered.

Stalking, In a still hot though hardened lava flow there are columnar joints which allow for the accumulation of water.The water source would be the floods which carved out the coulees, known as the Spokane floods, aka Bretz floods [for Harlan Bretz who first proposed them], or Missoula floods [from glacial Lake Missoula, the proposed water source] which did their work in a matter of a couple weeks total. If the basalt were cool there would be no mechanism by which the flowing water could cavitate large amounts of material in the short period of time allowed for the mega flooding. This fact is ignored by the standard modellers despite their admission that the flooding was certainly catastrophic. The lower levels of the potholes are the more dense columnar basalt while the upper levels are the porous vessicular stuff. In many places the porous vessicular stuff has been weathered and eroded right off the top of the columns, leaving the remarkable flat tops of the denser columns, but in the potholes the vessicular stuff near the top "overarches" the lower columns, which cavitation just would not do... my counterproposal is that as the water flowed down into the deeper sections through the vessicles and the columnar joints it encountered the "oven hot temperatures" that heated it into explosive steam, excavating rather than cavitating the potholes. This also explains for me the prevalent columnar features of the vertical coulee walls.

As for the Noah's Ark and Nessie, etc. claims, what I said was that these would help my worldview IF SUBSTANTIATED.Not that I make the claims... I don't. It's more that I prefer not to make unsubstantiated claims even though they would favorably help my case, kinda like you saying there are no fossils and that petrified wood is only fulgurites. You claim this because it supports your worldview, not because there is any substance to it.

Oh, and I'm unsure how you get "dinosaur" from "mammal"... do you simply discount the entire field of paleontology?

Truth extends beyond the border of self-limiting science. Free discourse among opposing viewpoints draws the open-minded away from the darkness of inevitable bias and nearer to the light of universal reality.

Webo, StalkingGoogle,Just a reminder that there is a forum rule about the number of posts in a day; the posting limit is set at 6 posts/day.I understand that once engaged in a discussion it is easy to lose track, but the thread will stillbe here tomorrow. Perhaps it is best to choose your spots and plan and combine your posts, rather than making short responses.

A quick cruise may convince one that the Crust has been altered in some zones more recently than in others.Consider the Jarowa.

There is some genetic evidence that the Andamanese have been largely isolated from the rest of humanity (though not necessarily living on the Andaman islands all the time) for 60,000 years. Around 30,000 years ago, there appears to have bee some mixing with another group (again, maybe not yet on the islands). Whether the two main groups (Great Andamanese and Onge-Jarawa) represent this partial merging 30,000 years ago is an open question. For more details see Chapter 6 (especially Endicott et al.).

These people were traveling for a reason, agreed, but no reason to assume they were not well established before some upheaval.Todaya quick glance out the porthole reveals Fossil Beds high and low, Ancient stream beds on mountain tops and old sea beds 25,000 feet below the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Not to mention Appalachian Mountains, Outback, etc. which have just sat there (maybe twisting a bit), eroding until the valleys meet the peaks.Dude like there had to be some place for these omniythic chthonic peoples to take refuge during ages of chaos.Do i hear half-million years ?

webolife wrote:If the basalt were cool there would be no mechanism by which the flowing water could cavitate large amounts of material in the short period of time allowed for the mega flooding.

It would seem you're assuming both that water caused these formation and that there was "mega flooding". I don't make those assumptions.

webolife wrote:my counterproposal is that as the water flowed down into the deeper sections through the vessicles and the columnar joints it encountered the "oven hot temperatures" that heated it into explosive steam, excavating rather than cavitating the potholes

My proposal is that water played little if any part.

webolife wrote:kinda like you saying there are no fossils and that petrified wood is only fulgurites

What I claimed was that this "fossilization" process has never been demonstrated, therefore it's safe to conclude it's fictional.

webolife wrote:You claim this because it supports your worldview, not because there is any substance to it.

I claim it because it's the case, this "fossilization" process seems impossible to replicate. That can only be the case if it's imaginary. As for supporting worldviews, your clearly are presupposing that this stuff really is "petrified wood", inicating your bias toward that belief.

webolife wrote:Oh, and I'm unsure how you get "dinosaur" from "mammal"... do you simply discount the entire field of paleontology?

Not sure what you're getting at here, to be honest. As for "the entire field of paleontology", historically speaking it's rife with fraud and hoaxes, to say nothing of the utter abandonment of the scientific method. Like astronogers, they simply tell stories to each other until it's believed. I know of no great (or even feeble) paleontological experiments, and experiment is the cornerstone of science.

It sounds to me like the onus is on StalkingGoogle to provide the evidence that these petrified logs are something else. He's provided plenty of rhetoric but nothing to back up his claims beyond "I don't know how it works therefore it doesn't work". Just because a process isn't known yet doesn't mean it should be written off as impossible. That would be like a 17th century man saying that instant wireless communication is impossible because it can't be demonstrated.

For example

StalkingGoogle wrote:

webolife wrote:there is absolutely no reason to discount the nature of petrified wood

Except for the fact that this supposed phenomenon can't be reproduced in experiments, which is the cornerstone of science and the ultimate arbiter of competing hypotheses.

The word you're missing is yet. Can't yet be reproduced in experiments. Until it's definitely proven one way or another we should keep an open mind.

Oh -- saw Lloyd's comment as I was about to post this... here it is anyway.

Thanks for the nod, DDaveo.

Dinosaur skeletons were thought by many for years to be put in place by God to lead disbelieving rational minds astray. Amazingly, SG apparently doesn't believe they exist, despite the millions of worldwide pieces of evidence to the contrary of his belief. Neither do catastrophic lava flows or floods apparently.

However, I will give SG credit for challenging science at the core level of premises, presuppositions, and biases.I try to do the same in many of my posts. However, this challenge is a double-edged sword, which needs to be wielded humbly and oh so carefully.

The original name for science is natural philosophy, which is entirely cognisant of the fact that all scientific endeavor is advanced upon some [ultimately unprovable] belief system. That's why we share divergent ideas and widely different perspectives on this forum. Just have to be watchful not to cut off our own head while wildly swinging that sword.

Truth extends beyond the border of self-limiting science. Free discourse among opposing viewpoints draws the open-minded away from the darkness of inevitable bias and nearer to the light of universal reality.

ddaveo wrote:It sounds to me like the onus is on StalkingGoogle to provide the evidence that these petrified logs are something else.

You start by assuming it's petrified logs, which betrays your bias. You have a faith based belief. All evidence you see will only reinforce your faith. As for the onus of providing evidence, I'll simply state that we have direct experimental evidence that electric arcs can make these kinds of objects on smaller scales. Plasma phenomena scale over many orders of magnitude. So we have direct evidence that electric arcs in soil or rock are a likely suspect. What about this "fossilization" fantasy? Where is the experimental verification of this process that reproduces what we see in these objects? Such experiments lie outside the realm of the possible, I suggest, because the very idea is a fantasy.

ddaveo wrote:Just because a process isn't known yet doesn't mean it should be written off as impossible.

If the phenomenon can not be reproduced in the lab it may be assumed fictional. That's one of the fundamental aspects of science. We have direct experimental verification of the notion that these are fulgurites. The process is possible and readily reproduced and observed to occur spontaneously as well. This fantasy about "fossilization" is utterly unproven. It relies on ideas that have never been shown viable by experiment. Until that time it's safe to assume it's fictional.

ddaveo wrote:The word you're missing is yet. Can't yet be reproduced in experiments. Until it's definitely proven one way or another we should keep an open mind.

Your use of the word "yet" presumes that it's just a matter of time, demonstrating the faith based nature of your belief. Until you are shaken out of that paradigm you will forever flounder on this issue. You are discounting an idea for which there is direct experimental evidence of the phenomenon taking place and embracing an idea that is not only highly implausible but based on nothing but wishful thinking, to be honest.

Actually what I said was the archaeological community is rife with fraud, and is generally practiced in an unscientific and romantic fashion, where stories are simply invented, and with nobody offering proof they're wrong, they are accepted. One of the reasons these ridiculous ideas are accepted so widely is because they are promote through the popular media, in a never-ending propaganda campaign to make people ignorant. How else would people accept the self-compressing gas ball stellar fusion model for so long, with so much good data coming in over that entire century?

http://www.uow.edu.au/~morgan/forest.htmEuropean timber was my business for years, I cut slices of petrified wood and polished them to sell, later on, I cut 8 tons of firewood a year, I know what is petrified wood, wood, and what is a fulgarite, I've built garden walls of sections of them . Get out a bit, even if it is to a natural history museum.The best fossilised bone I've seen was in precious black opal, at Grawen, near Lightning Ridge, NSW, unfortunately the one I dug was not fully fossilised, little more than hard clay, but quite recognisable as three vertebra encapsulated in more fragile material, darn, would have been worth a million even in the 70's if it was black opal!